HostThe greatest entrepreneur of this generation, Elon Musk. Hey guys, grab my stuff, sit there. I'm going to take this. All right, do this. Thanks for taking the time. How are you doing, brother? You keep him busy.
Elon MuskYeah, I mean, it's rarely a slow week.
HostI mean, in the world as well. Any given week, it just seems like things are getting nuttier. It's definitely a simulation. We've agreed on this at this point.
Elon MuskWell, look, if we are in some alien Netflix series, I think the ratings are high.
HostYes, ratings are high. How are the freedom of speech wars going? You've been at war for two years now.
Elon MuskYes. The price of freedom of speech is not cheap.
HostIs it? I think it's like 44 billion, something like that, give or take a billion.
Elon MuskGive or take a billion, yeah. Round numbers. It's pretty nutty. There is this weird movement to quell free speech kind of around the world, and this is something we should be very concerned about. You have to ask, like, why was the First Amendment such a high priority, like number one? One is because people came from countries where if you spoke freely you would be imprisoned or killed, and they were like, well, we would like to not have that here, because that was terrible. And actually, there's a lot of places in the world right now, if you're critical of the government, you get imprisoned or killed.
HostRight. We'd like to not have that. Are you concerned about that? I mean, I suspect this is a receptive audience to that message.
Elon MuskI think we always thought that the West was the exception to that—that we knew there were authoritarian places around the world, but we thought that in the West we'd have freedom of speech. And we've seen, like you said, it seems like a global movement.
HostIn Britain you've got teenagers being put in prison for memes.
Elon MuskIt's like, you do a Facebook post, throw him in the prison.
HostYeah, people have gotten actual prison for, like, obscure comments on social media. Not even reposting, yet. Not even. It's crazy. Pavel got thrown in prison recently. I'm like, that was pretty wild. I was like, what is the massive crime that—
HostRight, Pavel in France. And then of course we got Brazil with Judge Voldemort. That one seems like the one that impacts you the most. What's the latest on that?
Elon MuskWell, I guess we are trying to figure out, is there some reasonable solution in Brazil? The concern—I want to just make sure that this is framed correctly. And, you know, funny memes aside, the nature of the concern was that, at least at X Corp, we had the perception that we were being asked to do things that violated Brazilian law. So obviously we cannot, as an American company, impose American laws and values on other countries—we wouldn't get very far if we did that. But we do think that if a country's laws are a particular way and we're being asked to break them, and be silent about it, then obviously that is no good.
HostSo I just want to be clear. Sometimes it comes across as, Elon's trying to just be a crazy whatever billionaire and demand outrageous things from other countries.
Elon MuskWell, that is true. In addition, there are other things that I think are valid, which is, we obviously can't—any given thing that we do at X Corp, we've got to be able to explain in the light of day and not feel that it was dishonorable or that we did the wrong thing. So that's the nature of the concern. So we actually are in sort of discussions with the judicial authorities in Brazil to try to run this to ground, like, what's actually going on. If we're being asked to break Brazilian law, then that obviously should not sit well with the Brazilian judiciary. And if we're mistaken, we'd like to understand how we are mistaken. I think that's a pretty reasonable position.
HostI'm a bit concerned, as your friend, that you're going to go to one of these countries and I'm going to wake up one day and you're going to get arrested and I'm going to have to go bail you out or something. This feels very acute.
Elon MuskYeah, I mean, it's not a joke now. Like, they're literally saying—it's not just Biden saying we have to look into that guy. Now it's become quite literal.
HostWho was the guy who just wrote the Guardian piece about, like—
Elon MuskOh yeah, there have been three articles, I think, in the past three weeks. Robert Reich, but it wasn't just him, it was like three different articles.
HostThree different articles. That's a trend.
Elon MuskCalling for me to be imprisoned, in the Guardian. Guardian of what? What are they pro, exactly? Guardian of, I don't know, authoritarianism.
HostYeah, guardian of censorship. But the premise here is that you bought this thing, this online forum, this communication platform, and you're allowing people to use it to express themselves, therefore you have to be jailed. I don't understand the logic here. What do you think they're actually afraid of at this point? What's the motivation here?
Elon MuskI think if somebody's trying to push a false premise on the world, and that premise can be undermined with public dialogue, then they will be opposed to public dialogue on that premise because they wish that false premise to prevail. So the issue there is, if they don't like the truth, then we want to suppress it. Now, what we're trying to do with X Corp—I distinguish that from my son, who's also called X.
HostYou have parental goals. Everything's just called X, basically. Very difficult disambiguation, the son.
Elon MuskSo what we're trying to do is simply adhere to the laws in a country. So if something is illegal in the United States, or if it's illegal in Europe or Brazil or wherever it might be, then we will take it down or we'll suspend the account, because we're not there to make the laws. But if speech is not legal, then what are we doing? Now we're injecting ourselves in as a censor, and where does it stop and who decides? Where does that path lead? I think it leads to a bad place. So if the people in a country want the laws to be different, they should make the laws different, but otherwise we're going to obey the law in each jurisdiction.
HostRight. And some of these, Europe—
Elon MuskThat's it. It's not more complicated than that. We're not trying to flout the law, just to be clear about that. We're trying to adhere to the law, and if the laws change, we will change, and if the laws don't change, we won't. We're just literally trying to adhere to the law. It's pretty straightforward.
HostThere are some very straightforward—if somebody thinks we're not adhering to the law, well, they can file a lawsuit.
Elon MuskBingo. Also very straightforward.
HostI mean, there are European countries that don't want people to promote Nazi propaganda. They have some sensitivity to it.
Elon MuskWell, it is illegal in those countries, and if somebody puts that up, you take it down.
HostYes, but they typically file something and say take this down.
Elon MuskNo, in some cases it is just obviously illegal. Like, you don't need to file a lawsuit. If something is just unequivocally illegal, we can literally read the law—this violates the law, anyone can see that. You don't need—like, if somebody is stealing, you don't need, let me check the law on that. Okay, oh no, they're stealing.
HostFrisco, let's talk. So we had JD Vance here this morning. He did a great job. And one of the things is, there's this image on X of basically you, Bobby, Trump and JD as, like, the Avengers, I guess. And then there's another meme where you're in front of a desk where it says DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.
Elon MuskYes, I posted that one. I made it using Grok, the Grok image generator, and I posted it to my profile—seeking efficiency.
HostHow do you do it?
Elon MuskWell, I think with great difficulty. But look, it's been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and to remove absurd regulations. The last time there was a really concerted effort on that front was Reagan in the early '80s, so we're 40 years away from a serious effort to remove regulations that don't serve the greater good and reduce the size of government. And I think it's just—if we don't do that, then what's happening is we get regulations and laws accumulating every year until eventually everything's illegal. And that's why we can't get major infrastructure projects done in the United States. Like, if you look at the absurdity of the California high-speed rail, I think they've spent $7 billion and have a 600-foot segment that doesn't actually have rail in it.
HostYour tax dollars at work. What are we doing?
Elon MuskThat's an expense of 600 feet of concrete. And I realize sometimes I'm perhaps a little optimistic with schedules, but, you know, I wouldn't be doing the things I'm doing if I was not an optimist. But at the current trend, California high-speed rail might finish sometime next century. Maybe—probably not.
HostWe'll have teleportation by that time, so. Exactly. AI will do everything at that point.
Elon MuskI think, you know, the United States and many countries—it's arguably worse than the EU—is being, like, Gulliver tied down by a million little strings. Any one given regulation is not that bad, but you've got a million of them, or millions actually, and then eventually you just can't get anything done. And this is a massive tax on the consumer, on the people. They don't realize that there's this massive tax in the form of irrational regulations. I'll give you a recent example that is just insane. SpaceX was fined by the EPA $140,000 for, they claimed, dumping potable water on the ground—drinking water. And we're like, this is at Starbase, and we're in a tropical thunderstorm region. That stuff comes from the sky all the time. And there was no actual harm done. It was just water to cool the launchpad during liftoff. Zero harm done. And they agree—yes, there's zero harm done. We're like, okay, so there's no harm done and you want us to pay $140,000? It's like, yes, because you didn't have a permit. Okay, we didn't know there was a permit needed for zero-harm fresh water being on the ground in a place where fresh water falls from the sky all the time.
HostGot it. Next to the ocean.
Elon MuskNext to the ocean, because there's a little bit of water there too. Yeah. I mean, sometimes it rains so much the roads are flooded. So we're like, how does this make any sense? And then they were like, well, we're not going to process any more of your applications for Starship launch unless you pay this $140,000. They just ransomed us, and we're like, okay, so we paid $140,000. But it's like, this is no good. I mean, at this rate we're never going to get to Mars.
HostThat's the confounding part here. We're acting against our own self-interest. When you look at—we do have to make—putting aside fresh water, the rocket makes a lot of noise, so I'm certain there's some complaints about noise once in a while. But sometimes you want to have a party or you want to make progress and there's a little bit of noise, therefore you trade off a little bit of noise for massive progress or even fun. So when did we stop being able to make those tradeoffs? But talk about the difference between California and Texas, where you and I now reside. Texas, you were able to build the gigafactory—I remember when you got the plot of land, and then it seemed like it was less than two years when you had the party to open it.
Elon MuskYeah, from start of construction to completion was 14 months.
HostIs there anywhere on the planet that would go faster? Is, like, China faster than that?
Elon MuskChina was 11 months.
HostGot it. So Texas, China, 11 and 14 months. California, how many months?
Elon MuskAnd just to give you a sense of size, the Tesla gigafactory in China is three times the size of the Pentagon, which was the biggest building in America. There are bigger buildings, but the Pentagon's a pretty big one. In units of Pentagon, it's like three. Okay, three Pentagons and counting, in 14 months. The just the regulatory approvals in California would have taken two years.
HostYeah, so that's the issue. Where do you think the regulation helps? Like, for the people that will say we need some checks and balances, we can't have none, because for every good actor like you there'll be a bad actor. So where is that line, then?
Elon MuskYeah, I have a sort of—in doing sensible deregulation and reduction in the size of government, the way is just to be very public about it and say, like, which of these rules—if the public is really excited about a rule and wants to keep it, we'll just keep it. And here's the thing about the rules: if the rule turns out to be bad, we'll just put it right back. Okay? And then problem solved. It's easy to add rules, but we don't actually have a process for getting rid of them. That's the issue. There's no garbage collection for rules.
HostWhen we were watching you work—David and I and Antonio—in that first month at Twitter, which was all hands on deck, and you were doing zero-based budgeting, you really quickly got the cost under control, and then miraculously—everybody said this site will go down and you added 50 more features. So maybe explain, because this is the first time—there were so many articles like, this Twitter is dead forever, there's no way it could possibly even continue at all. It was almost like the press was waiting for you—let's write the obituary here.
Elon MuskThey were all saying their goodbyes on Twitter, remember that? Yeah, they were all leaving and saying their goodbyes, because the site was going to melt down and totally fail, and all the journalists left. Which—if you ever want to hang out with a bunch of hall monitors, oh my God, threads is amazing. Every time I go over there and post, they're really triggered. But yeah, I mean, if you like being condemned repeatedly for reasons that make no sense, then threads is the way to go. It's the most miserable place on Earth. If Disney's the happiest, this is the anti-Disney.
HostBut if we were to go into government—you went into the Department of Education, or pick the department, you've worked with a lot of them actually—sure, you can't go in there with zero-based budgeting, we get it, but if you could just pare two, three, four, five percent of those organizations, what kind of impact would that have?
Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I think we'd need to do more than that ideally, but compounding every year, two, three percent a year, it would be better than what's happening now. Look, I think if Trump wins—and obviously I suspect there are people with mixed feelings about whether that should happen—but we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once-in-a-lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government. Because the other thing besides the regulations: America is also going bankrupt extremely quickly, and nobody seems—everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one.
HostBut they're all grabbing the silverware, everyone's stuffing the silverware in their pockets before this Titanic sinks.
Elon MuskWell, you know, the Defense Department budget is a very big budget. It's a trillion dollars a year, DOD, Intel, a trillion dollars. And interest payments on the national debt just exceeded the Defense Department budget. They're over a trillion dollars a year just in interest, and rising. We're adding a trillion dollars to our debt, which our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay somehow. Every three months—and then soon it's going to be every two months, and then every month—and then the only thing we'll be able to pay is interest. And if this—it's just like a person at scale that has racked up too much credit card debt. This does not have a good ending. So we have to reduce the spending.
HostLet me ask one question, because I've brought this up a lot, and the counterargument I hear—which I disagree with—but the counterargument I hear from a lot of politicians is, if we reduce spending—because right now, if you add up federal, state and local government spending, it's between 40 and 50 percent of GDP. So nearly half of our economy is supported by government spending, and nearly half of people in the United States are dependent directly or indirectly on government checks, either through contractors that the government pays or they're employed by a government entity. So if you go in and you take too hard an axe too fast, you will have significant contraction, job loss and recession. What's the balancing act, Elon? Just thinking realistically, because I'm 100 percent on board with you. The next set of steps, however—assume Trump wins and you become the chief of DOGE—how, like, the challenge is, how quickly can we go in, how quickly can things change, and without—
HostI want that on my business card.
HostYeah, without all the contraction and job loss. So I guess, how do you really address it when so much of the economy and so many people's jobs and livelihoods are dependent on government spending?
Elon MuskWell, I do think it's sort of a false dichotomy. It's not like no government spending is going to happen. You really have to say, like, is it the right level? And just remember that any given person, if they are doing things in a less efficient organization versus a more efficient organization, their contribution to the economy, their net output of goods and services, will reduce. You've got a couple of clear examples—East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea. North Korea, they're starving; South Korea, it's amazing, it's the future.
HostThe compounding effect of productivity gains. It's night and day.
Elon MuskYeah, and so in North Korea you've got 100 percent government, and in South Korea you've got, probably—I don't know—40 percent government, it's not zero, and yet you've got a standard of living that is probably 10 times higher in South Korea, at least. And then East and West Germany. In West Germany, just thinking in terms of cars, you had BMW, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes. And East Germany, which is a random line on a map, the only car you could get was a Trabant, which is basically a lawnmower with a shell on it. It was extremely unsafe, and there's a 20-year wait, so you put your kid on the list as soon as they're conceived. And even then, only, I think, a quarter of people maybe got this lousy car. So that's just an interesting example of, like, basically the same people, different operating system. And it's not like West Germany was some capitalist heaven—it's quite socialist, actually. So when you look, probably it was half-half government in West Germany and 100 percent government in East Germany, and again, sort of at least a 5-to-10x standard of living difference, and even qualitatively vastly better. Sometimes people have these debates, in this modern era, as to which system is better. Well, I'll tell you which system is better: the one that doesn't need to build a wall to keep people in. Okay, that's how you can tell.
HostOkay, it's a dead giveaway. Spoiler alert.
Elon MuskDead giveaway. They're climbing the wall to get out. You have to build a barrier to keep people in—that is the bad system. It wasn't West Berlin that built the wall. They were like, anyone who wants to flee West Berlin, go ahead. And if you look at sort of the flux of boats from Cuba, there's a large number of boats from Cuba, and there's a bunch of free boats that anyone can take to Cuba. Like, hey, wow, an abandoned boat, I could use this boat to go to Cuba where they have communism, awesome. And yet nobody picks up those boats and does it. Amazing.
HostGiven this a lot of thought. Wait, so your point is jobs will be created if we cut government spending in half—jobs will be created fast enough to make up for it. Just to count?
Elon MuskYes, obviously. I'm not suggesting that people are immediately tossed out with no severance and can't pay their mortgage. They need to see some reasonable offramp where they're still earning, they're still receiving money, but have, like, a year or two to find jobs in the private sector, which they will find, and then they will be in a different operating system. Again, you can see the difference—East Germany was incorporated into West Germany, living standards in East Germany rose dramatically.
HostSo in four years, if you could shrink the size of the government with Trump, what would be a good target, just in terms of, like, ballpark?
Elon MuskI mean, are you trying to get me assassinated before this even happens?
HostNo, no, pick a number.
Elon MuskI mean, you know, there's that old phrase, go postal. They might go postal on me, so we'll keep the post office. I'm going to need all the security details, guys.
HostYes, I mean, this year the number of disgruntled workers, former government employees, is quite a scary number.
Elon MuskI might not make it. I was saying, low single digits every year for four years would be palatable.
HostYeah, and I like your idea. The thing is that if it's not done—like, if you have a once-in-a-lifetime, or once-in-a-generation opportunity, and you don't take serious action, and then you have four years to get it done, and if it doesn't get done—how serious is Trump about this? You've talked to him about it.
Elon MuskYeah, I think he is very serious about it. And no, I think actually the reality is that if we get rid of nonsense regulations and shift people from the government sector to the private sector, we will have immense prosperity, and I think we will have a golden age in this country, and it'll be fantastic.
HostCan we talk about SpaceX? You have a bunch of critical milestones coming up.
Elon MuskYeah, in fact there's an important, very exciting launch that may be happening tonight. So if the weather is holding up, then I'm going to leave here, head to Cape Canaveral for the Polaris mission, which is a private mission funded by Jared Isaacman—awesome guy. And this will be the first time, the first private, first commercial spacewalk, and it'll be at the highest altitude since Apollo. So it's the furthest from Earth that anyone's gone.
HostAnd what comes after that? Let's assume that's successful—and I sure hope so.
Elon MuskMan. No pressure. Yeah, you know, astronaut safety—if I had all the wishes I could save up, that would be the one to put on, because space is dangerous. So the next milestone after that would be the next flight of Starship. Starship is ready to fly; we are waiting for regulatory approval. It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than the paper can move from one desk to another.
HostThat stamp was really hard. Approved. You ever see that movie Zootopia? There's like a sloth in for the approval.
Elon MuskAccidentally tell a joke and I was like, oh no, this is good, here we go, going to take a long time. Sorry, sorry. But yeah, Zootopia. You know, the funny thing is, I went to the DMV about a year later, after Zootopia, to get my license renewal, and the guy, in an exercise of incredible self-awareness, had the sloth from Zootopia in his cube, and he was actually swift.
HostYeah, with the mandate, beat the sloth. No personal agency.
Elon MuskPersonal agency. No, I mean, some people think the government is more competent than it is. I'm not saying that there aren't competent people in the government; they're just in an operating system that is inefficient. Once you move them to a more efficient operating system, their output is dramatically greater, as we've seen. When East Germany was reintegrated into West Germany, the same people were vastly more prosperous with a basically half-capitalist operating system. But, I mean, for a lot of people, their most direct experience with the government is the DMV. And then the important thing to remember is, the government is the DMV at scale. That's the government.
HostGot the mental picture. How much do you want to scale it?
HostYeah. Sorry, can you go back to chat's question on Starship? So you announced just the other day, Starship going to Mars in two years—and by the way, huh?—and then four years for a crewed, aspirational launch in the next window. And how much is the government involved? I'm not saying, like, you watch these. But based on our current progress—
Elon MuskBased on our current progress, with Starship we were able to successfully reach orbital velocity twice. We were able to achieve soft landings of the booster and the ship in water, and that's despite the ship having half its flaps cooked off. You can see the video on the X platform, it's quite exciting. So we think we'll be able to launch reliably and repeatedly and quite quickly. And the fundamental holy grail breakthrough for rocketry—the fundamental breakthrough that is needed for life to become multiplanetary—is a rapidly reusable, reliable rocket.
HostR for the pirate somehow. Throw a pirate in there.
Elon MuskSo Starship is the first rocket design where success is one of the possible outcomes with full reusability. For any given project, you have to say, this is the circle to draw a diagram—has a circle, and is the success dot in the circle? Is success in the set of possible outcomes? That sounds pretty obvious, but there are often projects where success is not in the set of possible outcomes. And so Starship—not only is full reusability in the set of possible outcomes, it is being proven with each launch. And I'm confident it will succeed; it's simply a matter of time. And if we can get some improvement in the speed of regulation, we could actually move a lot faster. So that would be very helpful. And in fact, if something isn't done about reducing regulation and speeding up approvals—and to be clear, I'm not talking about anything unsafe, it's simply the processing of the safe thing can be done as fast as the rocket is built, not slower—then we could become a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species, ultimately, and be out there among the stars in the future.
Elon MuskAnd it's incredibly important that we have things that we find inspiring, that you look to the future and say the future is going to be better than the past—things to look forward to. Kids are a good way to assess this: what are kids fired up about? And if you can say, you could be an astronaut on Mars, you could maybe one day go beyond the solar system, we could make Star Trek, Starfleet Academy real—that is an exciting future, that is inspiring. You need things that move your heart.
HostYeah, fuck yeah, let's do it.
Elon MuskI mean, life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another. There's got to be things that you look forward to as well.
HostAnd do you think you might have to move it to a different jurisdiction to move faster? I've always wondered if rocket technology is considered an advanced weapons technology, so we can't just go do it in another country.
Elon MuskYes, it is.
HostInteresting. And if we don't do it, other countries could do it—I mean, they're so far behind us, but theoretically there's a national security justification here, if somebody can put their thinking caps on. Like, do we want to have this technology that you're building, the team's working so hard on, stolen by other countries, and then maybe they don't have as much red tape?
Elon MuskI wish people were trying to steal it. No one's trying to steal it. It's just too crazy, basically.
HostAnd that's for you. It's way too crazy. Elon, what do you think is going on that led to Boeing building the Starliner the way that they did? They were able to get it up but not complete—can't finish—and you're going to have to go up and finish.
Elon MuskWell, I mean, I think Boeing is a company that does so much business with the government, they've sort of impedance-matched to the government, so they're basically one notch away from the government, maybe two. They're not far from the government from an efficiency standpoint, because they derive so much of their revenue from the government. And a lot of people think, well, SpaceX is super dependent on the government, and actually no, most of our revenue is commercial. And there's been, I think—at least up until perhaps recently, because they have a new CEO who actually shows up in the factory—the CEO before that, I think, had a degree in accounting and never went to the factory and didn't know how airplanes flew. So I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes fly and spacecraft go to orbit, you need to know—it can't be a total mystery as to how they work.
Elon MuskSo, you know, sure, if somebody's running Coke or Pepsi and they're great at marketing or whatever, that's fine, because it's not a technology-dependent business. Or if they're running a financial consulting firm and their degree's in accounting, that makes sense. But I think if you're the cavalry captain, you should know how to ride a horse. Pretty basic. It's disconcerting if the cavalry captain just falls off the horse.
HostHe's scared—team, I'm sorry, I'm scared of horses—gets on backwards. I'm like, oops.
HostShifting gears to AI. Peter was here earlier and he was talking about how, so far, the only company to really make money off AI is Nvidia, with the chips. Do you have a sense yet of where you think the big applications will be from AI? Is it going to be enabling self-driving, is it going to be enabling robots, is it transforming industries? I mean, it's still, I think, early in terms of where the big business impact is going to be. Do you have a sense yet?
Elon MuskI think the spending on AI probably runs ahead of—I mean, it does run ahead of the revenue right now, there's no question about that. But the rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I've ever seen, by far. For example, the Turing test used to be a thing; now your basic open-source random LLM running on a freaking Raspberry Pi probably could beat the Turing test.
Elon MuskSo I think actually the good future of AI is one of immense prosperity, where there is an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services. Everyone can have whatever they want, except for things we artificially define to be scarce, like some special artwork. But anything that is a manufactured good or provided service will, I think, with the advent of AI plus robotics, the cost of goods and services will trend to zero. I'm not saying it'll be actually zero, but everyone will be able to have anything they want. That's the good future. And in my view, that's probably 80 percent likely, so look on the bright side.
HostOnly 20 percent—20 percent probability of annihilation, nothing. Is the 20 percent—what does that look like?
Elon MuskI don't know, man. I mean, frankly, I do have to go engage in some degree of deliberate suspension of disbelief with respect to AI in order to sleep well. And even then—because I think the actual issue, the most likely issue, is, well, how do we find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do a bit better? That is perhaps the bigger challenge. Although, at this point, I know more and more people who are retired, and they seem to enjoy that life. So I think there'll be some crisis of meaning, because the computer can do everything you can do but better, so maybe that'll be a challenge. But really, you need the sort of end factors—you need the autonomous cars and the humanoid robots, your general-purpose robots. But once you have general-purpose humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles, you can build anything. And I think there's no actual limit to the size of the economy. Obviously the mass of Earth is one limit, but the economy is really just the average productivity per person times the number of people—that's the economy. And if you've got humanoid robots, where there's no real limit on the number of humanoid robots, and they can operate very intelligently, then there's no meaningful limit to the economy.
HostYou guys just turned on Colossus, which is, like, the largest private cluster, I guess, of GPUs anywhere.
Elon MuskIt's the most powerful supercomputer of any kind.
HostWhich sort of speaks to what David said and kind of what Peter said, which is, a lot of the economic value so far of AI has entirely gone to Nvidia. But there are people with alternatives, and you're actually one with an alternative now. You have a very specific case, because Dojo is really about images and large images, huge video.
Elon MuskYeah, the Tesla problem is different from the LLM problem. The nature of the intelligence is different, and what matters in the AI is different. To the point you just made, in Tesla's case the context length is very long—so we've got gigabytes of context, gigantic context windows. You've got billions of tokens of context, an enormous amount of context, because you've got seven cameras. If you've got a minute of several high-def cameras, then that's gigabytes, so you need to compress. So the Tesla problem is, you've got to compress a gigantic context into the pixels that actually matter, and condense that over time. So you've got, in both the time dimension and the space dimension, you've got to compress the pixels in space and the pixels over time, and then have that inference done on a tiny computer, relatively speaking—a few-hundred-watt Tesla-designed AI inference computer, which is by far still the best. There isn't a better thing we could buy from suppliers. So the Tesla-designed AI inference computer that's in the cars is better than anything we could buy from any supplier.
HostJust by the way, the Tesla AI chip team is extremely good. There is a technical paper, and there was a deck that somebody on your team from Tesla published, and it was stunning to me. You designed your own transport control layer over ethernet—you're like, ah, ethernet's not good enough for us, you have this TTPoE or something, and you're like, oh, we're just going to reinvent ethernet and string these chips. It's pretty incredible stuff that's happening over there.
Elon MuskYeah, no, the Tesla chip design team is extremely, extremely good.
HostSo is there a world where, for example, other people over time that need some sort of video use case or image use case—theoretically you'd say, oh, why not, I have some extra cycles over here—which should kind of make you a competitor of Nvidia? Not intentionally per se, but.
Elon MuskYeah, I mean, the training and inference—we do have two of those projects at Tesla. We've got Dojo, which is the training computer, and then our inference chip, which is in every car, the inference computer. And Dojo—we've only had Dojo One. Dojo Two should be—we should have Dojo Two in volume towards the end of next year, and that will be, we think, sort of comparable to a B200-type training system. So there's, I guess, some potential for that to be used as a service. But Dojo is just kind of—I guess I have some improved confidence in Dojo, but I think we won't really know how good Dojo is until probably version three. Usually it takes three major iterations on a technology for it to be excellent, and we'll only have the second major iteration next year. The third iteration, I don't know, maybe late '26 or something like that.
HostHow's the Optimus project going? I remember when we talked last—and you said this publicly—that it's doing some light testing inside the factory. So it's actually being useful. What's the bill of materials, and when you start making it at scale, like you're making the Model 3 now and there's a million of them coming off the factory line, what would they cost—20, 30, $40,000, you think?
Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I've discovered really that anything made in sufficient volume will asymptotically approach the cost of its materials. Now, I should say, some things are constrained by the cost of intellectual property, like paying for patents and stuff. So a lot of what's in a chip is paying royalties and depreciation of the chip fab, but the actual material cost of the chips is very low. So Optimus, obviously, is a humanoid robot. It weighs much less, it's much smaller than a car, so you could expect that in high volume—and I've said you also probably need three production versions of Optimus, so you need to refine the design at least three major times, and then you need scale production to sort of the million-unit-plus-per-year level. And I think at that point the labor and materials on Optimus is probably not much more than $10,000.
HostAnd that's a decade-long journey, maybe.
Elon MuskBasically think of it like Optimus will cost less than a small car, at scale volume, with three major iterations of technology. So if a small car costs $25,000, it's probably, I don't know, $20,000 for an Optimus, for a humanoid robot that can be your body, like a combination of R2-D2 and C-3PO, a bit better. I honestly think people are going to get really attached to their humanoid robot. Because, I mean, you watch Star Wars, and it's like R2-D2 and C-3PO—I love those guys, they're awesome, and their personality. And all R2 could do is just beep at you, couldn't speak English. C-3PO would translate the beeps.
HostSo you're in year two of that. If you did two or three years per iteration or something, it's a decade-long journey for this to hit some sort of scale?
Elon MuskI would say major iterations are less than two years, so it's probably on the order of five years, maybe six, to get to a million units a year. And at that price point, everybody can afford one on planet Earth. I mean, it's going to be 1-to-1, 2-to-1.
HostWhat do you think, ultimately, if we're sitting here in 30 years, the number of robots on the planet versus humans?
Elon MuskYeah, I think the number of robots will vastly exceed the number of humans. Vastly. I mean, you have to say, like, who would not want their robot buddy? Everyone wants a robot buddy. Especially if it can take care of your—you know, it can take your dog for a walk, it could mow the lawn, it could watch your kids, it could teach your kids. We could also send it to Mars. We could send a lot of robots to Mars to do the work needed to make it a colonized planet.
HostMars is already the robot planet. There's, like, a whole bunch of robots, like Rovers and a robot helicopter.
Elon MuskYes, only robots. So yeah, I think the useful humanoid robot opportunity is the single biggest opportunity ever. Because, if you assume—I think the ratio of humanoid robots to humans is going to be at least 2-to-1, maybe 3-to-1, because everybody will want one, and then there'll be a bunch of robots that you don't see that are making goods and services.
HostAnd you think it's a generalized robot that then learns how to do different tasks?
Elon MuskYeah. I mean, we are a generalized robot, we're just made of meat. We're a meat—general meat. I'm operating my meat puppet. So we are, actually. And by the way, it turns out, as we're designing Optimus, we sort of learn more and more about why humans are shaped the way they're shaped, and why we have five fingers, and why your little finger is smaller than your index finger. Obviously why you have opposable thumbs, but also why, for example, the major muscles that operate your hand are actually in your forearm, and your fingers are primarily operated—the muscles that actuate your fingers are located, the vast majority of your finger strength, actually coming from your forearm, and your fingers are being operated by tendons, little strings. And so the current version of the Optimus hand has the actuators in the hand and has only 11 degrees of freedom, so it doesn't have all the degrees of freedom of a human hand, which has, depending on how you count it, roughly 25 degrees of freedom. And it's also not strong enough in certain ways, because the actuators have to fit in the hand. So the next-generation Optimus hand, which we have in prototype form, the actuators have moved to the forearm, just like a human, and they operate the fingers through cables, just like a human hand. And then the next generation has 22 degrees of freedom, which we think is enough to do almost anything that a human can do.
HostAnd presumably—I think it was written that X and Tesla may work together and provide services, but my immediate thought went to, oh, if you just provide a Grok to the robot, then the robot has a personality and can process voice and video and images and all of that stuff.
Elon MuskOh yeah.
HostAs we wrap here, I think—you know, everybody talks about all the projects you're working on, but people don't know you have a great sense of humor.
Elon MuskThat's not true.
HostOh, you do, you do. People don't see it, but I would say one of—I know for me the funniest week of my life, or one of the funniest, was when you did SNL, and I got to tag along. Maybe behind the scenes, like, some of your funniest recollections of that chaotic, insane week when we laughed for 12 hours a day.
Elon MuskIt was a little terrorizing on the first couple of days. I was a bit worried at the beginning there, because frankly nothing was funny. Day one was rough.
HostCan't you guys just say the stuff that got on the cutting—some of the funniest skits were the ones that didn't let you—that's what I'm saying. Can you just say there were a couple of funny ones that they didn't let you—you can say it, so that he doesn't get—I mean, how much time do we have here? Well, we should just give one or two, because it was—
HostWhich one do we regret most not getting on air?
Elon MuskYou really want to hear that? I mean, it was a little—I see, it was a little funny.
HostOkay, here we go. All right, here we go, guys.
Elon MuskAll right, so one of the things that I think everyone's been sort of wondering this whole time is, is Saturday Night Live actually live? Like, live live live, or do they have like a delay, just in case there's a wardrobe malfunction or something like that? Is it like a five-second delay? What's really going on? But there's a way to test this, right?
HostWe came out the way—there's a way to test this.
Elon MuskWhich is, we don't tell them what's going on. I walk on and they say, this is the script, I throw it on the ground. We're going to find out tonight, right now, it's Saturday—if Saturday Night Live is actually live. And the way that we're going to do this is, I'm going to take my cock out.
HostThis is the greatest pitch ever.
Elon MuskAnd if you see my cock, you know it's true, and if you don't, it's been a lie.
HostIt's been a lie all these years.
Elon MuskAll these years. Now, this is—we're going to bust them right now.
HostAnd we're pitching this. Yeah, so pitching this on Zoom, on like a Monday—after, like, we're kind of hungover from the weekend and like, pitch this. And it's Jason on, and Mike, and you.
Elon MuskYeah, and Mike. You know, my friends who I think are quite funny. Jason's quite funny, I think. Jason's the closest thing to Cartman that exists in real life.
HostWe have a joke that he's Butters and I'm Cartman.
Elon MuskYeah, so, and then my friend Mike's pretty funny too. So we come in, like, just guns blazing with ideas, and we didn't realize, like, actually that's not how it works. It's normally actors and they just get told what to do. And, like, oh right, well, you mean we can't just do funny things that we thought of?
HostWhat—there watching this, and on the Zoom they're aghast at the pitch. Yeah, it's silence.
Elon MuskIt's silence. I'm like, is this thing working? Is—are we muted, is our mic on? They're like, we hear you. And then after a long silence, like, Mike just says the word, crickets, crickets.
HostAnd they're not laughing, they're not even going to chuckle. Like, what's going on? And then Elon explains the punchline.
Elon MuskYes, which is—exactly, so there's more to it. Okay, that's just the beginning. So I said, like, I'm going to reach down into my pants, and I stick my hand in my pants and I'm going to pull my—and I tell this to the audience, and the audience is going to be like, go—and then I pull out a baby rooster, you know. And it's like, okay, this is kind of PG, it's not that bad. It's like, this is my tiny cock. And it's like, what do you think?
HostAnd so then—do you think it's an icebreaker? I mean, I like it.
Elon MuskI pitch—I'm like, and then Kate McKinnon walks out.
HostYeah, exactly.
Elon MuskAnd I'm like, oh no, but you haven't heard half of it. Kate McKinnon comes out, and she says, Elon, I expected you would have a bigger cock. And I'm like, I don't mean to disappoint you, Kate, but I hope you like it anyway. But Kate's got to come out with her cat, okay? And Kate says—you can see where this is going—and I say, nice, wow, that's a nice cock you've got there, Kate, wow, that's amazing. It looks a little wet, was it raining outside? And then, um, do you mind if I stroke your cock, is that cool? It's like, oh no, Elon. Actually, can I hold your cock? Of course, of course, Kate, you can definitely hold my cock. And then we exchange—and I think just the audio version of this is pretty good, right? It's like, wow, I really like stroking your cock. And then you say, I'm really enjoying stroking your cock. Yes, of course. And yeah, so they're looking at us like, oh my God, what have we done, inviting these lunatics on the program.
HostYeah, they said, like, well, it is Mother's Day.
Elon MuskIt's Mother's Day, we might not want to go with this one, the moms in the audience. And I'm like, well, that's a good point, fair, it might be a bit uncomfortable for all the moms in the audience. Maybe—I don't know, maybe they'll dig it, maybe they like it. So yeah, that's the cold open that didn't make it. We didn't get that on the air. But we did fight for Doge, yes, and we got Doge on the air.
HostThere's a bunch of things that I said that were just not on the script—like, they have these Q cards for what you're supposed to say, and I just didn't say it, I just went off the rails.
Elon MuskYeah, they didn't see that coming. It's live.
HostYeah, it's live. And so Elon wanted to do Doge—this is the other one—and he wanted to do Doge on late night, and he says, hey, can you make sure—
Elon MuskOh yeah, so I wanted to do the Doge Father, like, you sort of redo that scene from The Godfather. I mean, you kind of need the music to cue things up. You bring me on my daughter's wedding—listen, you ask for Doge, yeah, you got Bitcoin, I give you Bitcoin, but you want Doge. Exactly. You really got to set the mood, you have to have a tuxedo, you got to have like Marlon—you come to me on this day of my Doge's wedding, and you ask me for your private keys. Are you even a friend? You'll call me the Doge Father.
HostSo that has potential—great potential. So they come to me, and I'm talking to Colin and Joe, who's got a great sense of humor and he's amazing, he loves Elon, and he's like, we can't do it because of the law and stuff like that, the law and liability. So I said, it's okay, Elon called Comcast and he put in an offer and they just accepted it, we just bought NBC, so it's fine. And Colin Jost looks at me—I sold this so good—and he's like, you're serious? I'm like, yep, we own NBC now. And he's like, okay, well, that kind of changes things, doesn't it? I'm like, absolutely, where are we going to go on Doge? And then he's like, you're fucking with me. And I'm like, am I fucking with you, or are we, or are we?
HostIt was the greatest week. And that, like, is two of 10 stories. We'll save the other eight. But it was—and I was just so happy for you, to see you have a great week of just joy and fun and letting go, because you were launching rockets, you're dealing with so much shit in your life. To have those moments, to share them and just laugh, it was just so great. And more of those moments—I think we got to get you back on SNL. Who wants them back on SNL one more time? All right, ladies and gentlemen, our bestie, Elon Musk.